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Saturday, April 30, 2011

A excellent demake of an excellent RTS Game.
House Globe delivers the gameplay of Homeworld in a beautiful side scrolling shooter styled game.
The game features detailed pixel art, awesome soundtrack and a very portal-ish styled voice over. There is even an multi-player available.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

The ongoing outage of the PSN was caused by "external intrusion" so far this was already known. But seems the "hackers" got your personal data as well, or maybe, well sony dont know exactly which should worry you.

Coming to a foggy town after getting a letter from your dead wife, sounds familiar?
"Soundless Mountain" a great demake of Silent Hill II show how this amazing survival horror game would look on a 8bit NES.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Since Lion's latest build features 1024x1024 sized icons and Wallpapers up to 3200x2000 pixel there is a lot of rumor going on that we soon see Mac's with retina display.

I would love to have a Macbook with retina display, since i have the iPhone4 i got used to it and always shudder when i get the smartphone of a friend and those see those old school pixelated displays.

What is a retina display?Based on the assertion that a display of approximately 300 ppi at a distance of 12 inches (305 mm) from one's eye is the maximum amount of detail that the human retina can perceive. Retina displays are displays that exceed this ppi ratiom. For example the iPhone4 has a ppi of 326.

Friday, April 22, 2011

Version 0.9 of MyPhoneTracker features a new gui (cocoa style,resizeable,faster) and a nearly complete core rewrite.

You can load the database from a local iTunes Backup, the application will display all backups for your devices ordered by date.
Or load the file from an actual iPhone (jailbreak required).
The file is named "consolidated.db" and you find it inside "/private/var/root/Library/Caches/locationd/consolidated.db".

For Android devices the file is called "cache.cell" for cell determined locations and "cache.wifi" for WiFi determined locations.
You can find the file(s) inside the folder "/data/data/com.google.android.location/files".

Thursday, April 21, 2011

After quite a few people was concerned that the iPhone/iPad tracks your estimated position (cell tower triangulation) in a database, it seems most Android Phones does it as well

In the /data/data/com.google.android.location/files directory you find the files cache.cell & cache.wifi which contains logs of your movement. You will need root access to the device to read this directory.

The next version of MyPhoneTracker gonna be able to visualize those datas as well.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

MyPhoneTracker, an application brought to you by this blog, allows you to visualize the location tracking database of iPhones and Androids on a interactive map.

Be aware that the data the devices collect are determined through cell tower triangulation so its by far not 100% correct.

You can import the database from a local iTunes Backup, the application will display all backups for your devices ordered by date.
Or load the file from an actual iPhone (jailbreak required). The file is named "consolidated.db" and you find it inside "/private/var/root/Library/Caches/locationd/consolidated.db".

For Android devices the file is called "cache.cell" for cell determined locations and "cache.wifi" for WiFi determined locations.
You can find the file(s) inside the folder "/data/data/com.google.android.location/files".

Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, two security researchers have announced that since the release of iOS 4 every device with a SIM (iPhone,iPad) tracks the location of the device on a ongoing basis determined through cell-tower triangulation and stores it in a local database. The position is not determined through GPS which hints that this data is used to improve the network quality. The data is only on your local device and is not transfered to Apple or any 3rd party so you wont need to worry about being tracked. The only problem i see on this matter is that this file is unencrypted available on your device and local backups so if someone steals your phone or Mac they can create pretty scary movement log. Also this gives a little insight on the tracking abilities of the phone companies and the government.

Photosynth is a software application from Microsoft Live Labs and the University of Washington that analyzes digital photographs and generates a three-dimensional model of the photos and a point cloud of a photographed object. Pattern recognition components compare portions of images to create points, which are then compared to convert the image into a model. And now you can all do this on your iPhone!

Evernote is a digital file cabinet, you can create notebooks and store any kind of digital information inside them. You can search and organize those informations quickly and in a intuitive way. Evernote is basically a online service with multiplattform clients, but you can work offline as well and sync your notes back when you are online. The free online service has monthly usage limitations (currently 60 MB/month), and displays a "usage" meter. A premium service is also available that currently costs $5 per month or $45 per year, and currently offers 1,000 MB/month usage.

Sunday, April 17, 2011

AmigaOS is the default native operating system of the Amiga personal computer. It was developed first by Commodore International, and initially introduced in 1985 with the Amiga 1000. Early versions (1.0-3.9) run on the Motorola 68k series of 16-bit and 32-bit microprocessors.

On top of a preemptive multitasking kernel called Exec, it includes an abstraction of the Amiga's unique hardware, a disk operating system called AmigaDOS, a windowing system API called Intuition and a graphical user interface called Workbench. A command line interface called AmigaShell is also available and integrated into the system. The GUI and the CLI complement each other and share the same privileges.

AmigaOS was very advanced and ahead of its time.
In this tutorial i show you how to install AmigaOS 3.1 inside E-UAE on Mac OS X.

From systems that have developer preview 2 of Lion or Lion Server installed, run Software Update and download Mac OS X Lion Developer Preview 2 Update. You must also download Xcode 4.1 Developer Preview 3 available from the Mac Dev Center to build apps with this version of Lion.

If you have not yet downloaded developer preview 2 of Lion and Lion Server, get your redemption code from the Mac Dev Center then proceed to the Mac App Store to redeem your code and download Lion.

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Cocoa Packet Analyzer is a native Mac OS X implementation of a network protocol analyzer and packet sniffer similar to Wireshark(Windows).

The application allows you to make detailed analyzes of network traffic for debug and research tasks.

CPA supports the industry-standard PCAP packet capture format for reading, capturing and writing packet trace files.
It is also extendable through analyzer plugins, which can be created using Cocoa bundles technologies.

Friday, April 15, 2011

Mac OS X Server is now a core feature of OS X Lion, and bundled with the standard version of Mac OS X. Server Tools are not installed by default, but can be installed by clicking customize during the installation process. Mac OS X Server includes services and applications for file sharing, sharing contact information and calendars, schedule events, send secure instant messages, conduct live video conferences, send and receive email, contribute to and comment in wikis, publish a companywide blog, produce and distribute podcasts, and set up websites.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

MCMap Live is a Minecraft mapper, like Cartograph for Mac OS X. It is a wrapper for mcmap, Zahl's fantastic and fast isometric Minecraft map renderer. What makes MCMap Live special is that it renders maps in pieces and lets you view them right away in an intuitive, minimalist interface. You can scroll and zoom all around your world and as quick as mcmap can render the chunks, you will see them. Instant gratification!

Monday, April 11, 2011

If you collect a lot of notes, snippets and website links over the day managing all those can be a real pain.

Notational Velocity is a way to take notes quickly and effortlessly using just your keyboard. You press a shortcut to bring up the window and just start typing. It will begin searching existing notes, filtering them as you type. You can use ⌘-J and ⌘-K to move through the list. Enter selects and begins editing. If you’re creating a new note, you just type a unique title and press enter to move the cursor into a blank edit area.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Every Sunday i will show you how to emulate classic operating systems from the 90's on Mac OS X.

Today we start with Windows 3.1Windows 3.1 was first released during March 1992.
The year of Windows 3.1's release was successful for Microsoft, who were named the "Most Innovative Company Operating in the U.S." by Forbes Magazine, while Windows became the most widely-used GUI-based operating environment.

Warning this post contains a lot! of images, loading could take a while.

In computing, a TRIM command allows an operating system to inform a SSD which blocks of data are no longer considered in use and can be wiped internally.

TRIM was introduced soon after SSDs started to become an affordable alternative to traditional hard disks as permanent storage in PCs. Because low-level operation of SSDs differs significantly from traditional hard disks, the typical way in which operating systems handle operations like deletes and formats resulted in unanticipated progressive performance degradation of write operations on SSDs. TRIM enables the SSD to handle garbage collection overhead, that would otherwise significantly slow down future write operations to the involved blocks, in advance.

Saturday, April 9, 2011

Optical media is on the eve of extinction, at least in the apple world. But still from time to time you need to burn a CD or DVD to exchange data. Mac OS X allows you to backup data to a writeable media directly in the Finder or let you burn a Audio-CD in iTunes but if you need more advanced options you need to use some third party app.
Burn is an excellent choice, its lightweight and still very powerful and should fullfil all your burning needs.

Friday, April 8, 2011

Open Sonic is an open-source game based on the "Sonic the Hedgehog" universe. It introduces a different style of gameplay called cooperative play, in which it's possible to control 3 characters simultaneously. Unlike most similar games, Open Sonic provides a greater level of interaction between the player and the levels. It's more than just a jump'n'run; the user must come up with some strategy in order to get through the levels.

Kod an lightweight editor for programmers offers a skinnable Interface trough regular CSS3, Syntax highlighting for 65 languages (Kod uses the same format as GNU Syntax Highlight so it can be easily extended), and a clean and simple interface.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Give Vowl a list of tags, and it displays an unattended slideshow of random Flickr photos matching those tags.
By default it shows you "cat", "dog", and "chicken" photos, but this can be changed in the preferences.
You can also customize the delay between each photo, and whether or not Vowl floats above all other windows.

Traditionally, chat clients on the Mac have been anything but glamorous. Colloquy is an advanced IRC, SILC & ICB client which aims to fill this void. By adhering to Mac OS X interface conventions, Colloquy has the look and feel of a quality Mac application.

Versions records the evolution of a document as you create it. Mac OS X Lion automatically creates a version of the document each time you open it and every hour while you’re working on it. If you need to revert to an older version or retrieve part of a document, Versions shows you the current document next to a cascade of previous versions — in an interface similar to that of Time Machine — so you can see how your work looked at any given time. You can revert with a click, or quickly copy and paste work from a previous version into the current version.

Monday, April 4, 2011

In the last days many Dropbox users experienced crashes and other problems with the Lion Developer Preview 2. Today Dropbox released a client (forum build) that is compatible with the Developer Preview 2 (build 11A419).

From time to time, for me almost never ;), it happens you need to run a Windows application, since you can install Windows on your mac in a second partition or use a virtual machine like Parallels or VMWare that should be no problem but this takes times, money and if you just need it once in a while is total overkill.

Linux users might know Wine the windows wrapper that allows them to run Windows applications, since wine is multiplattform you can use it as well on Mac OS X. But it means a lot of config file editing, try & error and some luck to get good working results.

Here WineBottler comes in, it allows you to transform Windows applications to Mac applications using a simple interface.